Clawing My Way to the Middle“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ― Sun Tzu

Rolling Forward with Films

It has been bitter cold this weekend and I’ve been trying to keep a small cold at bay. At least we’ve had a few days of sun which is a good change from the dark clouds over Michigan. This past week was our first week of official pre-production on “The Christ Slayer” so.. busy, busy – let’s take a look back at our week. (Coffee sip)

Teaser poster for “The Christ Slayer”

The Christ Slayer

We’re moving forward with shooting our third and final installment of The Quest Trilogy – entitled The Christ Slayer. I’ve been ignoring lots of the angry noise flying about around us in the news and just focusing on the load of work before me. That in itself has been quite consuming and refreshing. Friday we opened our new bank account and we’ve started to fuel up the ship. It was a two-hour bank trip dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s but now that’s set. Casting and crewing is about 80% complete since we’ve had the pleasure of team building over several films now. We’ve got many returning faces and a few new ones and in a few weeks we’ll again be in Yuma, AZ filming.

Casting – I’m very excited about several of our new casting choices. Christine Solomon and Carl Weyant will be wonderful to work with. This week we’re announcing a few new supporting actors via PR but I will let you faithful readers know in advance. Ms. Lana Wood and Mr. David Gries will be joining our cast. I’ve worked with both of them and I’m excited to have them onboard. We’ve also been reviewing reels and reads and feel very close to making a few additional casting decisions.

Crewing – we’re still in talks on a few crew positions but those cards are falling quickly into place. I’m excited to have our chef Eddie back on board. Great food goes a long way with people working away from home.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Chasing the Star – we’re getting to the last VFX shots and the mixing of the final film. We’re also about to go over end credits which is painful because almost always you end up with a misspelled name or worse yet, miss someone completely. I’m excited that we’re so close to being done. I am going to try to set up a screening of the film for our Yuma folks prior to filming the third. We’ll also be doing a premiere in Michigan before moving into certain theatre chains. Our deal with Bridgestone Multimedia is complete and we’ll be getting the home video street dates very soon.

DJ Perry and Jesse Low (Director) on set of “Forty Nights” – the camp of John the Baptist

Forty Nights –

We should have some new artwork to review in the coming weeks. The release date for the remastered “Forty Nights: film will be 4/4/17 and we’re also exploring some in-store signings. This film was beautiful before but we had such a tight release schedule last year with Wal-Mart that the film wasn’t as polished as we wanted. That said, people enjoyed the beauty previously but now we’ve got a film that’s a bit closer to our director’s vision. I’m also excited about foreign sales to start rolling on this first film.

Wild Faith

As of Friday our director/editor was working the last scene of the film. After that we’ll review, polish and lock it up. From there we’ll move it into post sound/music as “Chasing the Star” is moving out. I’m going to start looking at trailer and teaser poster work on the film. We’ve had LOTS of interest in this movie and so I do want to explore the possibility of the tv series.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

As mentioned above, the tv series could put our teams to work for several months. We’ve also got a few feature films in development. I also had an update on C.U.J.O. which is moving a bit slower but larger budget studio films tend to follow that pattern. The dog trainer may come visit us while in AZ. Aside from those developments I’m focused on the role at hand. I’ll have a clear head on what I want to pursue once “The Christ Slayer” is behind me.